[SOLVED] Publisher exporting music symbols as gibberish

[Somnus]

Hello everyone,

I'm having an issue where I took a screenshot of some staff notation and put it into a document. If I try to export document as a PDF now, Publisher is changing all the musical notes in the screen shot image into gibberish in another font. It's like Publisher is trying to read the image and turn text it finds into editable text or something, but again, it's only changed on the export. I've included the affinity file, the PDF, and screen shots. Thanks for your help guys!

Encomia_rev.pdf Encomia_rev.afpub

[walt.farrell]

52 minutes ago, Somnus said:

I'm having an issue where I took a screenshot of some staff notation and put it into a document. If I try to export document as a PDF now, Publisher is changing all the musical notes in the screen shot image into gibberish in another font.

There's something about that description that seems incorrect. If it was a screenshot it would be an image, and there would be no text to change into another font.

What you actually have in your sample .afpub file (thanks for providing it) is a page with 3 embedded PDF files with text, not screenshot(s).

It is puzzling that the exported file comes out wrong, though, as you've Placed them in Passthrough mode, which should not require access to the fonts.

With a bit of playing around I can say that it is the clipping rectangles that you have nested in the PDFs layers that is causing the problem. Without them, the fonts survive the Export process properly (though the layout is very messed up at that point).

[lacerto]

(...)

[benwiggy]

Sigh. There are just so many needless quirks to Affinity's PDF handling, that make it unreliable for this kind of work. 

[Alfred]

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t regard this as having “no problems”!

Look at the splits in the staves. (I also think it’s potentially confusing to talk about “cropping by clipping”, since cropping and clipping work the opposite way around from each other and can produce visually different results.)

[lacerto]

(...)

[Alfred]

38 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

i think it may be just you ;-). Did you comment a low-res JPG screenshot of an image that Affnity apps use to represent a PDF to be passed through?

Oops! I guess that’s exactly what I did!!

39 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

As for correct terminology, I do not think I am the first one on this forum to use the term "crop" to refer to using only part of an imported image (and hiding the rest).

A good point well made, as they say.

[Somnus]

19 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

There's something about that description that seems incorrect. If it was a screenshot it would be an image, and there would be no text to change into another font.

What you actually have in your sample .afpub file (thanks for providing it) is a page with 3 embedded PDF files with text, not screenshot(s).

It is puzzling that the exported file comes out wrong, though, as you've Placed them in Passthrough mode, which should not require access to the fonts.

With a bit of playing around I can say that it is the clipping rectangles that you have nested in the PDFs layers that is causing the problem. Without them, the fonts survive the Export process properly (though the layout is very messed up at that point).

Thank you for taking a look! I was under the false impression that they were screenshots, since that's what I normally do. Once you pointed that out to me I was able to get it taken care of. Thanks!